nd emotions that
have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The
moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and
say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have
done"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it
didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing
it came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubled
about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an
atom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public
morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that they
are very bad guardians--provocative guardians.... And when at last there
came a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we were
in the full tide of passionate intimacy.

I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return.
She had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically
recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed
how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and
conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was such
a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living,
breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had had
no right even to imperil.

I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and
putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps
I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so
freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at
the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight
brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we
declared, "pull the thing off." Margaret must not know. Margaret should
not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done.
We tried to sustain that....

For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically
cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began
to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all
about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming
possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her
unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden
love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband
and wife. But I never spoke of it to